American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital LibraryLibrary of Congress, American Memory.This expansive archive of American history and culture features photographs, prints, motion pictures, manuscripts, printed books, pamphlets, maps, and sound recordings going back to roughly 1490. Currently this site includes more than 9 million digital items from more than 100 collections on subjects ranging from African-American political pamphlets to California folk music, from baseball to the Civil War. Most topical sites include special presentations introducing particular depositories or providing historical context for archival materials. Visitors can search collections separately or all at once by keyword and type of source (photos and prints, documents, films, sound recordings, or maps). In addition, the Learning Page provides well-organized help for using the collections, including sample teaching assignments. WWW.History includes individual annotations for many of the current collections.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO.Website last visited on 2008-10-06.

New Deal NetworkFranklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and Institute for Learning Technologies, Teachers College, Columbia University. See JAH web review by Charles Forcey. Reviewed 2002-03-01.A database of more than 20,000 items relating to the New Deal. A “Document Library” contains more than 900 newspaper and journal articles, speeches, letters, reports, advertisements, and other textual materials, treating a broad array of subjects relevant to the period’s social, cultural, political, and economic history, while placing special emphasis on New Deal relief agencies and issues relating to labor, education, agriculture, the Supreme Court, and African Americans. The “Photo Gallery” of more than 5,000 images is organized into five units—“Culture,” “Construction,” “Social Programs,” “Federal Agencies,” and miscellaneous, including photos from 11 exhibitions and five series of photoessays, and images of disaster relief and public figures. The site additionally offers featured exhibits, many with lesson plan suggestions. Presently, the features section includes “The Magpie Sings the Depression,” a collection of 193 poems, articles, and short stories, and 275 graphics from a Bronx high school journal published between 1929 and 1941 with juvenile works by novelist James Baldwin, photographer Richard Avedon, cultural critic Robert Warshow, and film critic Stanley Kauffmann; “Dear Mrs Roosevelt” with selected letters written by young people to the first lady; “Student Activism in the 1930s,” which contains 38 photographs, graphics, and editorial cartoons, 12 American Student Union memoirs, 40 autobiographical essays, and a 20,000-word essay by Robert Cohen on 1930s campus radicalism; 17 selected interviews from American slave narratives gathered by the Works Progress Administration; and an illustrated essay on the history and social effects of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Includes approximately 100 annotated links to related sites. Of great value for teachers, students, and researchers interested in the social history of the New Deal era.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.Website last visited on 2007-10-18.

Studs Terkel: Conversations with AmericaChicago Historical Society . See JAH web review by Clifford M. Kuhn. Reviewed 2004-09-01.Part of the digital repository, Historical Voices, this site was created in honor of Studs Terkel, the noted oral historian, radio host of “The Studs Terkel Program,” and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Dedicated to making Terkel’s 50 years of work available, it presents material pulled from approximately 5,000 hours of sound recordings. The seven galleries—The Studs Terkel Program; Division Street: America; Hard Times; The Good War; Race; Talking to Myself; and Greatest Hits—center on the extensive interviews Terkel completed for the radio show and his books and contain more than 400 audio clips of interviews. Most of the interviews are about 15 minutes in length and explore diverse subjects, including Chicago architecture, urban landscape, immigrants, street life, the 1929 stock market crash, organized labor, New Deal programs, race relations, and integration. Interviewees include Chicago architect Frank Lloyd Wright and labor activist Cesar Chavez as well as men and women on a train to Washington D.C. for the 1963 Civil Rights March. Sound recordings are searchable by date, keyword, or author. Complementing this site is an educational section intended to help students and teachers use oral history in the classroom and a 55-minute interview with Terkel. This well-designed site offers a rich history of many influential, as well as lesser-known, personalities living in the second half of the 20th century and is beneficial to anyone interested in the Great Depression, World War II, race relations, and labor issues.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO.Website last visited on 2007-09-24.

American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1940American Memory, Library of Congress. See JAH web review by Thomas Thurston. Reviewed 2001-09-01.Approximately 2,900 life histories from 1936–1940 compiled and transcribed as part of the Federal Writers' Project for the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA)are featured on this site. Documents represent the work of more than 300 writers from 24 states. The histories, in the form of drafts and revisions, vary from narrative to dialog, report, or case history. A typical history describes an informant’s family, education, income, occupation, political views, religion and mores, medical needs, diet, and other observations on society and culture. Interviewers often substituted pseudonyms for names of individuals and places. The Special Presentation, “Voices from the Thirties”—adapted in part from the book First Person America by Ann Banks and illustrated with photographs of the Project’s staff at work, interviewees, and their environments—provides the context for the creation of the Life Histories Collection and includes excerpts from sample interviews. Visitors can select a particular U.S. state or search the archive by keyword. Life histories are presented in facsimiles of original interview documents and as searchable text. This multifaceted collection provides materials for teaching subjects such as slavery and 19th-century American folk cultures as well as social history of the Great Depression.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.Website last visited on 2007-09-25.

America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935–1945American Memory, Library of Congress.More than 160,000 images taken by government photographers with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Office of War Information (OWI) during the New Deal and World War II eras are featured on this site. These images document the ravages of the Great Depression on farmers, scenes of everyday life in small towns and cities, and, in later years, mobilization campaigns for World War II. This site includes approximately 1,600 color photographs and selections from 2 extremely popular collections: “’Migrant Mother’ Photographs” and “Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination.” The site also provides a bibliography, a background essay of about 500 words, seven short biographical sketches of FSA-OWI photographers, links to 7 related sites, and 3 essays on cataloging and digitizing the collection. The photographs are searchable by keyword and arranged into a subject index.Resources Available: IMAGES.Website last visited on 2007-10-01.

Federal Resources for Educational Excellence: History & Social StudiesU.S. Department of Education.This megasite brings together resources for teaching U.S. and world history from the far corners of the web. Most of these websites boast large collections of primary sources from the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the National Archives and Records Administration, and prominent universities. There are more than 600 websites listed for U.S. history alone, divided by time period and topic: Business & Work, Ethnic Groups, Famous People, Government, Movements, States & Regions, Wars, and Other Social Studies. While most of these websites are either primary source archives (for example, History of the American West, 1860–1920) or virtual exhibits, many offer lesson plans and ready-made student activities, such as EDSITEment, created by the National Endowment for the Humanities. A good place to begin is the (Subject Map), which lists resources by sub-topic, including African Americans (67 resources), Women’s History (37 resources), and Natural Disasters (16 resources). Each resource is accompanied by a brief annotation that facilitates quick browsing.
Resources Available: TEXT.Website last visited on 2008-10-06.

Integrated Public Use Microdata SeriesMinnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota. See JAH web review by Joel Perlmann. Reviewed 2003-06-01.Currently provides 22 census data samples and 65 million records from 13 federal censuses covering the period 1850–1990. These data “collectively comprise our richest source of quantitative information on long-term changes in the American population.” The project has applied uniform codes to previously published and newly created data samples. Rather than offering data in aggregated tabular form, the site offers data on individuals and households, allowing researchers to tailor tabulations to their specific interests. Includes data on fertility, marriage, immigration, internal migration, work, occupational structure, education, ethnicity, and household composition. Offers extensive documentation on procedures used to transform data and includes 13 links to other census-related sites. A complementary project to provide multiple data samples from every country from the 1960s to 2000 is underway. Currently this international series offers information and interpretive essays on Kenya, Vietnam, Mexico, Hungary, and Brazil. Of major importance for those doing serious research in social history, the site will probably be forbidding to novices.Resources Available: TEXT.Website last visited on 2008-10-08.

The Dramas of HaymarketCarl Smith, Northwestern University, and Chicago Historical Society. See JAH web review by Martin Blatt. Reviewed 2001-12-01.Curated by Carl Smith, Professor of English and American Studies at Northwestern University in a collaborative effort with the Chicago Historical Society, this rich site provides an online exhibit commemorating one of the most notorious incidents in late-nineteenth-century labor history, the Haymarket Affair. On May 4, 1886, two workers were killed in a struggle between police and locked-out union members at the McCormick Reaper factory. On May 5, 1886, someone threw a dynamite bomb into a group of Chicago policemen sent to control the ensuing protest, killing seven. This site is an online exhibit of selected materials from the Chicago Historical Society’s Haymarket Affair Digital Collection. Organized in the form of a drama, the site contains a prologue, five acts, and an epilogue, all arranged chronologically. The prologue, “Whither America,” covers the period between Chicago’s Great Fire in 1871 through 1880, with emphasis on the railroad strike of 1877 and other developments in the radicalization of American workers. Act I, “Subterranean Fire,” discusses the widening class divisions and resulting rising level of violence in America. Act II, “Let Your Tragedy be Enacted Here,” recounts the demonstrations of 1886, the protestors’ meeting, and the bombing. Act III, “Toils of the Law,” covers the legal proceedings beginning with the “red scare” and police “witch hunt” following the bombing and continuing through the sentencing of the convicted anarchists in October 1886. Act IV, “Voice of People,” relates the legal and public appeals ending with the executions of 1887. Act V, “Raising the Dead,” moves from the funerals of the executed men to Governor John P. Altgeld’s pardon of the surviving defendants in 1893. The epilogue, “Drama Without End,” deals with the contested heritage of Haymarket, including centennial events in 1986. Each part consists of a 500-word interpretive essay and topical sections including a total of over 50 visual materials, such as images of artifacts, photographs, and engravings of the people involved in the Haymarket Affair, and over 30 facsimiles of selected manuscripts and printed materials. Each “Act” contains a final section that includes full-text transcriptions of documents from the Haymarket Digital Collection. The site also includes virtual tours of the Haymarket area and of Forest Home Cemetery, where a monument to the convicted men is located, and audio recordings of contemporary labor songs. This site is beautifully contextualized, well-presented, and easy to navigate. It contains a keyword search engine as well as a table of contents.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO.Website last visited on 2008-10-08.

Kentuckiana Digital LibraryKentucky Virtual Library.Provides a wealth of historical material from 15 Kentucky colleges, universities, libraries, and historical societies. Includes nearly 8,000 photographs; 95 full-text books, manuscripts, and journals, from 1784 to 1971; 94 oral history interviews; 78 issues of the magazine Mountain Life & Work, from 1925–62; and 22 issues of the publication Works Progress Administration in Kentucky: Narrative Reports, covering 1935–37. Includes photographic collections of renowned photographer Russell Lee, who documented health conditions resulting from coal industry practices; Roy Stryker, head of the Farm Security Administration photographic project; and others that provide images of a variety of cities, towns, schools, camps, and disappearing cultures. Presents oral histories pertaining to Supreme Court Justice Stanley F. Reed, U.S. Senator John Sherman Cooper, the Frontier Nursing Service, American military veterans, Appalachian fiddlers, and the transition of an area from farming to an industrial economy. Texts include Civil War diaries, religious tracts, speeches, correspondence, and scrapbooks. Includes documents on colonization societies, civil rights, education, railroads, feuding, the Kentucky Derby, exploits of Daniel Boone, pioneer surgery, and a recollection of Abraham Lincoln. Valuable for those studying changes in the social and cultural history of the state.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO.Website last visited on 2007-11-23.

WTO History Project University of Washington. See JAH web review by Patrick F. Gillham. Reviewed 2013-09-01.Designed to provide access now and in the future to documents created by groups that protested the World Trade Organization’s “Ministerial Week,” held in Seattle from November 29-December 3, 1999. Offers texts of more than 80 oral histories of organizers and participants, 73 photographs, and images of 224 fliers, posters, and leaflets. Also includes 46 planning documents, 18 signs carried by protesters, two audio files, three videos, and a timeline documenting 520 events from March to December 1999. A second timeline covers the week of protests and a table with contact information for more than 1,400 organizations that opposed the meetings. Documents in the collection can be searched by keyword, organizations, and issues—labor, environment, trade, democracy, direct action, food, agriculture, health, and independent media. The site’s creators state they are “dedicated to ensuring that any account ever written of the WTO protests be attentive to the range of people who turned out, the varieties of strategies and issues they brought to the streets and the meeting rooms, and the coalitions that emerged and failed.” As a result, the site will be of great value to those studying social protest movements in the late 20th century.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO.Website last visited on 2003-11-29.

U.S. Steel Gary Works Photograph Collection, 1906–1971Indiana University Northwest, Calumet Regional Archives.This site presents more than 2,200 digital images of the Gary Works Steel Mill and the corporate town of Gary, Indiana. The “tour” includes 36 photographs with interpretive text documenting the creation of the steel mill and city life in Gary. The main body of the site contains thousands of digital images and users can search by keyword or browse by subject and date for various aspects of this planned industrial community. The subject headings include the steel mill and its workers; factories and furnaces; houses and office buildings; women, children, and welfare facilities; and work accidents. The “Contextual Materials” section is a good starting place for historians and researchers interested in the Industrial Revolution. It includes an approximately 2,200-word introductory essay, “The Magic City of Steel,” by Steve McShane; four magazine articles dating from 1907 to 1913; six book excerpts, including the 1911 work by John Fitch, The Steel Workers; 14 pages from Raymond Mohl and Neil Betten’s Steel City: Urban and Ethnic Patterns in Gary, Indiana, 1906–1950 and the Carl Sandburg poem, “The Mayor of Gary.” This section is rounded out by a nearly 80-item bibliography and links to additional information about Gary, steel making, and 30 archival collections. There is also a “Teacher’s Guide” with ten primary and secondary school lesson plans and other online activities. A great site that is easily navigable for researchers, teachers, and students.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.Website last visited on 2008-10-14.

WPA Life Histories, Virginia InterviewsLibrary of Virginia.Provides approximately 1,350 life histories and youth studies created by the Virginia Writers‘ Project (VWP)—part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project—between October 1938 and May 1941. In addition, the site offers more than 50 interviews with ex-slaves conducted by the VWP’s all-black Virginia Negro Studies unit in 1936 and 1937 and six VWP folklore studies produced between 1937 and 1942. The life histories—ranging between two and 16 pages in length—offer information on rural and urban occupational groups and experiences of individuals during the Depression, in addition to remembrances of late 19th-century and early 20th-century life. The youth studies investigate experiences of young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who left school and include a survey of urban black youth. The ex-slave narratives, selected from more than 300 that were conducted for the project—of which only one-half have survived—provided research for the 1940 WPA publication The Negro in Virginia. Interviews and studies were edited—sometimes extensively—at the Richmond home office. Each study includes a bibliographic record with notes searchable by keyword; for many records, notes are structured to include searchable data on age, gender, race, nationality, industrial classification, and occupation. The site includes a 2,300-word overview of the project. Valuable for those studying social, economic, and cultural life in Virginia during the Depression, in addition to early periods, youth culture, and the history of slavery.Resources Available: TEXT.Website last visited on 2008-10-09.

Black Loyalists: Our History, Our PeopleIndustry Canada. See JAH web review by Madeline Burnside. Reviewed 2009-12-01.This exhibit documents African Americans, freed and escaped slaves, who fought for the British during the Revolutionary War. This website tells the story of black Loyalists who were evacuated to Nova Scotia with illustrated vignettes, short biographies, a timeline, and descriptions and maps. ”Our Story", one of five main sections, presents a short history of the experiences of the Black Loyalist in Nova Scotia. Divided into seven subsections, including Revolution, Exile, Arrival, Prejudice, Faith, Suffering, and Exodus, it discusses the significance of Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, the role of black communities in Nova Scotia, the prejudicial treatment African Americans endured, the role of churches, the Sierra Leone Company, and voyage to Freetown. ”People" contains short biographies of 23 prominent Black Loyalists, religious leaders, and other influential settlers. ”Communities" offers detailed descriptions and maps of four Black Loyalist communities. Perhaps the best component ”Documents", designed to help users develop a sense of what life was like for Black Loyalists. Original documents have been transcribed, including several autobiographical accounts of the life of Black Loyalists written by both blacks and whites in Nova Scotia. There is an excellent collection of court records, official proclamations, personal letters, bills, survey records, land sales, and other official documents. John Clarkson’s first person account (nearly 200 pages) of his voyage to Nova Scotia to recruit Black Christian settlers for Sierra Leone is one of the many excellent documents available. An interactive timeline offers a broad perspective and the resource page includes lists of secondary sources and related websites.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.Website last visited on 2003-07-17.

Gilder Lehrman Institute of American HistoryGilder Lehrman Institute of American History. See JAH web review by Chauncey Monte-Sano. Reviewed 2009-03-01.This large, attractive site provides high-quality material on American history for historians and teachers. The collection contains more than 60,000 “rare and important” American historical documents from 1493 to 1998 includes more than 34,000 transcripts. Authors include George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln. Users can also search the complete database of the Institute’s collection. Each week an annotated, transcribed document is featured, and an archive contains eighty past featured documents. “Treasures of the collection” offers 24 highlighted documents and images. Six online exhibits cover topics such as Alexander Hamilton, the Dred Scott decision, Abraham Lincoln, and topics such as freedom and battles. Teaching modules cover more than 20 topics corresponding to major periods in American history, each with a historical overview, lesson plans, quizzes, primary source material, visual aids, and activities. Additional resources include links to historical documents, published scholarship, and general history resources on the web. There are also descriptions of the Institute’s public programs and summer seminars, essay contests, national book prizes, and awards for teachers and students.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO.Website last visited on 2008-10-06.

Flint Sit-Down StrikeHistorical Voices. See JAH web review by Nancy Gabin. Reviewed 2006-09-01.This rich, multi-media resource provides an introduction to “the greatest strike in American history.” For those unfamiliar with the strike, the site includes a 300-word introductory essay with a 7-item bibliography and 7-item webography. It uses audio files that contain the actual voices of former strikers reminiscing about their experiences. The 3 main sections—organization, strike, and aftermath—provide nearly 100 audio memories accompanied by interview transcripts. Each main section also includes a descriptive essay of less than 1,000 words. In addition to the audio memories, there are slideshows, a Flash-generated strike map, and a timeline, each telling the strike story from a different perspective. For example, the site map focuses on the location of strike events, while the timeline offers a temporal vantage point. Users can zoom in and out of the map and click on a plant or icon to read about it and to hear audio clips pertaining to that location. This site offers a comprehensive oral history of the event and is a wonderful resource for high school and college history students and instructors. Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO.Website last visited on 2007-12-03.

In Motion: The African-American Migration ExperienceSchomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. See JAH web review by Clare Corbould. Reviewed 2006-09-01.This extensive, well-designed website features images, essays, lesson plans, and maps all focused on the movements of African Americans from the 1400s to the present. The site is built around the history of 13 African American migration experiences: the transatlantic slave trade (1450s-1867), runaway journeys (1630s-1865), the domestic slave trade (1760s-1865), colonization and emigration (1783–1910s), Haitian Immigration (1791–1809), Western migration (1840s-1970), Northern migration (1840s- 1890), the Great Migration (1916–1930), the Second Great Migration (1940–1970), Caribbean immigration (1900-present), the return South migration (1970-present), Haitian immigration in the 20th century (1970-present), and African immigration (1970-present). Each section includes an extensive image gallery with 60 or more images, two or more color maps and charts, an overview, short web essays on aspects of the migration with links to excerpts from various works on the subject, educational materials, a bibliography, and links to related websites. There are more than 67 detailed and informative color maps and more than 8,300 images available. Educational materials include at least two lesson plans (most have five or more) in each section and links to related resources. More than 90 lesson plans are available. An interactive timeline extends from the 15th to the 21st century and places migration in the context of U.S. history and the history of the African Diaspora. Searching is limited to a keyword search.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.Website last visited on 2008-10-06.

Chronicling America: Historic American NewspapersLibrary of Congress and NEH. See JAH web review by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley. Reviewed 2008-09-01.This website serves as a comprehensive resource for information on newspapers published in the United States from 1690 to the present. Its digital content comprises more than 680,000 individual newspaper page images drawn from close to 100 newspapers published in California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, Texas, Utah, and Virginia, between 1880 and 1910. Large cities are well-represented (for example, Washington D.C., and New York), as are medium-sized cities (Richmond, Virginia, and Louisville, Kentucky) and smaller towns (Berea, Kentucky). This content is fully keyword searchable, and search terms appear highlighted on each newspaper page. Newspaper pages can then be zoomed for detailed viewing and downloaded in high-quality .jpg or .pdf format. By 2011, the website plans to include newspaper page images dating back to 1836. The website also provides basic publication information about more than 11,500 newspapers published from 1690 to the present. This information includes date, place, and frequency of publication, as well as holdings information for researchers interested in visiting the libraries where these newspapers are kept. The database can be searched by keyword, language, ethnic audience, or labor focus (from “agricultural industries” to “woodworkers”). Resources Available: TEXT.Website last visited on 2008-11-01.

Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History ProjectJames N. Gregory, University of Washington. See JAH web review by Peter Cole. Reviewed 2009-03-01.This collection of hundreds of primary sources documents the long history of struggle for equal rights by various ethnic group sin Seattle, including Filipino, Chinese, Japanese and Native Americans, Jews, Latinos, and African Americans. The website integrates labor rights movements with struggles for political rights, as is evident in “special sections” that highlight the Chicano/a movement, the Black Panther Party, Filipino Cannery Unionism, the United Construction Workers Association, Communism, and the United Farm Workers. Each section brings together oral histories, documents, newspapers, and photographs that are accompanied by written and video commentary to provide historical context. The collection of more than 70 oral histories of activists is especially useful for understanding the lived experience of racism and its especially subtle workings in the Pacific Northwest. Together, these resources provide important national context for the civil rights struggle, too often understood as a solely southern phenomenon.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, VIDEO.Website last visited on 2006-11-22.

American History 102: Civil War to the PresentStanley K. Schultz, University of Wisconsin-Madison.This site reflects efforts to teach an American history survey course entirely through technology. Offers student lecture notes; 32 biographical sketches of prominent figures treated in the course, searchable by occupation, name, and era; bibliographic information; exams and review sheets; and a gallery of more than 200 photographs, many of which are taken from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. The overall presentation is somewhat fragmented, but the site is rich in resources. Perhaps most valuable is a directory of history websites, organized by subject and time period. Professor Stanley Schultz and his associates have designed the site as a supplement for his videotaped lectures on the post-Civil War period.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO.Website last visited on 2008-10-09.

Emma Goldman PapersBerkeley Digital Library.This site provides primary resources on Emma Goldman (1869–1940), a major figure in the history of radicalism and feminism in the United States prior to her deportation in 1919. Includes selections from 4 books by Goldman; 18 published essays and pamphlets; 4 speeches; 49 letters; 5 newspaper accounts of her activities; nearly 40 photographs, illustrations, and facsimiles of documents. Materials in this site were selected from those gathered and organized by the Emma Goldman Papers Project, an ongoing effort that has resulted in a 69-reel microfilm edition of her papers and other publications. Additional items in the site include selections from a traveling exhibition, issues of “Open Road: The Newsletter of the Emma Goldman Papers,” 4 sample documents from the forthcoming book edition of her papers; and a curriculum for middle and high school students to aid the study of freedom of expression, women’s rights, anti-militarism, and social change. The site reproduces a 6,500-word essay on the project’s history and a 9,000-word bibliographic essay.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.Website last visited on 2007-10-04.

Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940–1941American Memory, Library of Congress.This site presents “a multi-format ethnographic field collection” that examines migrant work camps in central California in 1940 and 1941. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) managed the camps; migrants from the rural areas of Oklahoma and nearby states inhabited them. Offers 371 audio recordings of songs, interviews, and camp announcements; 23 photographs; transcriptions of 113 songs; a scrapbook of newspaper clippings dealing with labor and migration issues; 11 camp newsletters; a Works Progress Administration folk song questionnaire; field notes and correspondence of Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin, the original collectors of these materials; two published magazine articles by Todd, giving the historical context of the collecting expedition; and other items concerning everyday migrant life and the collecting of folk materials. Topics range from camp court proceedings and personal narratives to square dances and baseball games. Also includes a 14-title bibliography; a 1,700-word background essay entitled “The Migrant Experience”; and a 1,400-word essay on the recording expedition. A valuable site for those interested in audio and written materials documenting the experiences of Depression-era migrants and their folk traditions.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO.Website last visited on 2007-09-27.

A New Deal for the ArtsNational Archives and Records Administration.This exhibit, divided into five sections, presents artifacts from New Deal art programs, introduced by a 250-word essay. “Rediscovering America” discusses “artistic nationalism” and provides five photographs and five paintings of American scenes. “Celebrating the People” exhibits five paintings and one photo of people at work and two photos and three programs of celebrations of folk culture. In “Work Pays America,” five posters, two paintings, and two photos document and celebrate New Deal programs. The 11 works exhibited in “Activist Arts” make more and less subtle political arguments, including Dorothea Lange’s “Children in a Democracy” and a flier for a Workers’ Alliance meeting. A section on “Useful Arts” exhibits 15 pieces, including informational posters, photos of quilting lessons, and a WPA handcraft wall hanging. The exhibit is easy to navigate, although visitors must return to the home page between each section. Useful for those studying the politics, social messages, and images of the New Deal.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES.Website last visited on 2001-05-30.

Pluralism and UnityDavid Bailey, Michigan State University, and David Halsted, H-Net.Presents a wide array of materials that explore “the struggle between these two visions” of pluralism and unity in early 20th-century American thought and life. Arranged into six major sections: “The Idea of Pluralism”; “The Idea of Internationalism”; “Culture and Pluralism”; “Labor and Pluralism”; “Race and Pluralism”; and “Gender and Pluralism”. The site links to major sites on such topics as ethics, politics, culture, sociology, anthropology, religion, economics, imperialism, hegemony, world systems theory, League of Nations, Jim Crow laws, eugenics, the Niagara Movement, NAACP, KKK, unions, strikes, modernism, the genteel tradition, localism, and ragtime. Outlines the perspectives of important public figures including William James, Eugene Debs, Randolph Bourne, Daniel DeLeon, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Horace Kallen, Scott Nearing, Max Eastman, William Cowper Brann, Madison Grant, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Charles S. Peirce, Margaret Mead, Woodrow Wilson, John Reed, and Irving Berlin. Although many of the site’s direct links to texts by these figures are no longer operable, users can access sites containing important writings through the “Concepts” section of each of the six major parts. Also includes 12 audio components and dozens of photographs. For its inclusion of links to many extremely useful sites from a variety of perspectives, this site will be valuable to those studying early 20th-century American ideas and debates and their resonance throughout later times.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO.Website last visited on 2008-10-09.

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory FireKheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University. See JAH web review by Ellen Wiley Todd. Reviewed 2001-06-01.On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City causing the deaths of 148 garment workers—an event that came to be known as one of the hallmark tragedies of the industrial age. This website tells the story of the fire in six chapters: Introduction; Sweatshops and Strikes; Fire; Mourning and Protest; Relief Work; and Investigation, Trial, and Reform. The text, targeted to a middle and high school student audience, is accompanied by numerous primary sources that could be of use to more advanced researchers. These include close to 70 photographs, 18 newspaper articles, 17 testimonials, three oral histories, excerpts from investigative reports written in the years following the fire, several letters from witnesses, a lecture given by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins in 1964, and a radio drama re-enacting the event. Accompanying these primary sources is a list of victims and witnesses, a selected bibliography of works surrounding the fire, and tips for writing a student paper.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO.Website last visited on 2007-10-28.

Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies Pennsylvania Historical Association.This website makes available a searchable archive of hundreds of regular journal articles, annotated documents, book reviews, and reviews of museum exhibits, films, and historical collections from past issues of the journal. The quarterly journal publishes current scholarship on the history of Pennsylvania and the surrounding area. Currently, back issues from 1934–2003 (vol. 1–70) are available. One volume will be added to the archive each year. The various items in the archive are available as .pdf documents, and they are accompanied by full bibliographic data. Back issues can be searched by author and title, as well as the full text of the item. There are also links to the Pennsylvania Historical Society, Penn State University Libraries, and the Penn State Press. A very useful resource for studying Pennsylvania history or the history of the mid-Atlantic region.Resources Available: TEXT.Website last visited on 2008-10-06.

Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill WorldJames Leloudis and Kathryn Walbert, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. See JAH web review by Adina Back. Reviewed 2001-12-01.A companion to the book Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher Daly, this site offers selected oral history resources that depict lives in the southern textile mill towns from the 1880s to the 1930s. The site is divided into 3 chronological sections. “Life on the Land” discusses the agricultural roots of the rural south, the changes in farm labor after the Civil War, and the economic factors that caused the South’s transition from agriculture to mill work in the late 19th century. “Mill Village and Factory” describes the work done in the textile mills and life in the company mill towns that were built to house the millhands. “Work and Protest” discusses the millhands' labor protests of the 1920s, formation of unions in the mills, and the textile strike of 1934. Each section includes a roughly 700-word introduction that contextualizes the materials. The site contains a total of 15 photographs of men, women, and children at work in the mills and nearly 70 audio clips drawn from hundreds of oral history interviews with descendants of millhands and others involved in the history of the Southern textile industry. The images and audio clips are described with brief (25–50 word) descriptions of the contents. Captions for the audio clips also contain information on the interviewer, interviewee, and the date of the interview. Teaching ideas are included within each section. The site offers 42 links to related sites, including the archives used in the project and related teaching resources. This site is ideal for studying rural southern life and labor history from Reconstruction through the 1930s.
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Resources Available: IMAGES, AUDIO.Website last visited on 2007-10-16.

The 19th Century in Print: PeriodicalsAmerican Memory, Library of Congress.Part of the Library of Congress American Memory Project, this site offers full-text transcriptions of 23 popular 19th-century periodicals digitized by the Cornell University Library and the Preservation Reformatting Division of the Library of Congress. Among the periodicals on this site are literary and political magazines, as well as journals like Scientific American, Manufacturer and Builder, Garden and Forest, and the North American Review. Each periodical is accompanied by very brief (10–15 word) notes on the name and location of the publisher and the years and volumes covered. With the temporary exception of Garden and Forest, each periodical’s full text is searchable by keyword and phrase. A special presentation offers a roughly 750-word essay on the historical background of Garden and Forest by Sheila Connor, the Horticultural Research Archivist at the Arnold Arboretum. There are also links to five related American Memory resources. The site’s broad sampling of periodicals provides an easily navigated source for articles and editorials on a number of 19th-century political, cultural, and social issues.Resources Available: TEXT.Website last visited on 2008-10-08.

Prelinger ArchivesRick Prelinger, in association with the Internet Archive, San Francisco.. See JAH web review by Ilana Nash. Reviewed 2008-06-01.The Prelinger Archives, a privately held collection of 20th-century American ephemeral films (produced for specific purposes at specific times, not intended for long-term preservation), are featured on this site. The site contains nearly 2,000 high-quality digital video files documenting various aspects of 20th-century North American culture, society, leisure, history, industry, technology, and landscape. It includes films produced between 1927 and 1987 by and for U.S. corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, and educational institutions. Some of the films depict ordinary people in normal daily activities, such as working, dishwashing, driving, and learning proper behavior. For example, one 1955 film illustrates the “comfort and delight” of jet travel for Pan American World Airways and a 1930s film shows how and where bananas were grown and imported into the United States. The site contains an alphabetical index and printable list of all film titles. This is an important source for those interested in American Studies, business and labor history, advertising and art history, cinema studies, and cultural history.Resources Available: VIDEO.Website last visited on 2007-10-24.

Connecticut History OnlineConnecticut Historical Society, University of Connecticut, Mystic Seaport Museum, New Haven Colony Historical Society. See JAH web review by Walter W. Woodward. Reviewed 2006-03-01.This pilot site is a collaborative effort between the Connecticut Historical Society, the Thomas H. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut, and the Mystic Seaport Museum, funded by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It offers approximately 14,000 images depicting Connecticut’s history from the beginning of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. The images are divided into five categories: “Livelihood” offers images of the workplace; “Diversity” depicts racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic variety in the state; “Lifestyle” captures everyday life in the state’s families and communities; “Infrastructure” is a broad category that includes images of government, public, private, and commercial buildings, bridges, education, emergency services, and transportation; and “Environment” offers images of the state’s natural and constructed landscapes and townscapes. Each image includes notes on the creator, date, and place created, medium, repository information, and a brief (40-word) description of the subject. Visitors can search the site by keyword, subject, creator, title, and date. The site also includes two sample lesson plans for middle school classes comparing and contrasting two Connecticut families and the roles of men and women through exercises interpreting the site’s images, a list of ideas for future topics, and themes for secondary-level classrooms. By summer 2004, “Phase Two,” with additional material and a new search interface, will be in operation. This site is ideal for teachers and students interested in the history of Connecticut and its communities.Resources Available: IMAGES.Website last visited on 2008-10-08.

Library of Virginia Digital Library ProgramLibrary of Virginia.The Library of Virginia holds over 1.2 million items digitized on their website, including more than 40,000 photographs and maps, more than 350,000 court documents, and over 800,000 manuscripts, including governors’ letters, land office grants, Revolutionary War bounty land warrants, Confederate pensions, and disability applications. Several collections are digitized and or cataloged on this website, as well as 25 exhibits on Virginia history. Users can find photographs that document buildings and people; patents and grants submitted to the Virginia Land Office between 1623 and 1992; Northern Neck Grants and Survey forms filed between 1692 and 1892; military records, including Revolutionary War state pensions material and World War I History Commission Questionnaires; WPA Life Histories; and Virginia Religious Petitions from 1774 to 1802. Exhibits deal with topics including the legacy of the New Deal in Virginia; resistance to slavery; Virginia roots music (with seven audio selections); Thomas Jefferson; John Marshall; Virginia’s coal towns; and political life in the state. A wealth of material for those studying Virginia and life in the South.Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO.Website last visited on 2007-10-25.